Wendell Berry's Questionnaire

I ran across this poem on another blog (ruminations from the distant hills) and couldn't resist reprinting it.

Questionnaire (Wendell Berry)

December 1, 2009

1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

_____________   __________   ________

2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

______________  ___________    ___________

3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.

______________ ____________  ______________

4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

__________    __________________         ____________________

*

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

____________ _________ _______________

How Can We Know the Dancer from the Dance?

GRITS FLASH!!! For all you grits fans, here's a LINK to some great recipes, as well as an explanation of the difference between hominy grits and stone ground.

(Vagabonde has pointed out that these recipes are full of typos -- here's ANOTHER LINK
to the place the grits came from and some more recipes -- maybe more usable.)

Now, back to the post of the day.

I have this second picture as the 'wallpaper' on my computer screen and every time I see it, I think of dancing figures.

And some lines of poetry start running through my head.

Here they are, in the final stanza of William Butler Yeats' "Among School Children."

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Silly Raining Word Play

Rose are red,
Violets are blue.
I don't usually allow myself to write poetry,
& I know you wish I wouldn't too.


*******


Sunflowers are yellow,
Daisies are white.
I could create a masterpiece
in the quiet beauty of the night.

photo source

*******


Thistles are purple,
Dandelions grant wishes,
Does anyone have
any Hershey's Kisses?





*******


Leaves are usually green
until they fall off the tree.
Did you see that lady with
the tattoo of a butterfly on her knee?



photo source



*******


Keyboards are clicky,
your chair rolls nicely.
Will you please bring me
home a frozen coke icy?




*******


My shower steams up nicely,
my shampoo smells good.
Do you think I should give up
writing poetry for good?



Rhyming comments get extra points.

The Last Day of Poetry Month

Carl Sandburg's ten definitions of poetry -- and each one is a poem in itself.

1. Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break the silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllable, wave lengths.

2.Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.

3. Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.

4. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

5. Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.

6. Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

7. Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.

8. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

9.Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

10. Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen in a moment.

As I read these, trying to decide which was my favorite (2, or maybe 5, or possibly 6, oh, wait, 9), it seemed to me that each of these would work equally well as a definition for Life itself.

NOTICE! Today is the last day to leave a comment and ask to be entered in the drawing for the quilt book. Contest closes at 9 pm EST -- winner announced tomorrow.